Death Eater
by the.goal.is.greatness
Summary: In everyone's life, they have to make a choice. Defeat the darkness. Or let it consume them. [Lucius x OC]


**Title:** Death Eater  
**Genre:** Romance / Drama  
**Rating: **K+  
**Pairing:** Lucius x OC  
**Spoilers:** N/A  
**Summary:** In everyone's life, they have to make a choice. Defeat the darkness. Or let it consume them.  
**Word Count:** 1,286  
**Warnings:** N/A

**Disclaimer:** _Harry Potter_ belongs to the great J.K. Rowling. I THINK the summary is from one of the Spider-Man movies.

**A/N:** I have a soft spot for Lucius, I don't know. Maybe it because I love that _Peter Pan_ movies from the early 2000's.

* * *

There is a feeling in the air that something is coming, a feeling that the very air itself is holding its breath, waiting for something that is hidden just out of sight. There is a feeling that, at any moment, something will suddenly appear, and change the world. It is palpable and tense and strained.

Evangeline Grey let her eyes skim across the castle grounds. Even the air at Hogwarts felt poignant, thick enough to cut with a knife. She shivered.

"Cold, my dear?"

She glanced up at the cool voice and smiled softly as Lucius stood next to her. "No, just thinking." She stared at him. Something was different, but she couldn't tell what. His hair was as immaculate, as always. His skin as unblemished as a porcelain doll. His robes pressed. But there was a look in his eyes that was haunted and faraway, not here with her in this moment. "Where are you?"

The focus slipped back into his eyes slowly, like water filling a glass, and he quirked one corner of his mouth up. "I'm right here."

Her head tilted. "No, you're somewhere else, thinking about something else. Are you alright?"

He straightened his shoulders, stiffened his spine. "Of course I am, my dear. You should never think otherwise."

It was like this with so many people she knew these days. They were a little different every day, becoming something, someone, else. Slowly, so slowly, that it was almost imperceptible. Until one day you sat down across from someone who had known for years, someone who shared your dorm, your classes, your bed, and you didn't know them. You didn't know the look in their eye (troubled and sinister and dark) and you didn't know the feeling they gave off (broken and sad and different) and you didn't know who they were anymore. Couldn't pin down the moment they had changed, only knew that they had.

She was frowning at him prettily, still disbelieving, still knowing he was lying, hiding, something. He straightened. "Shall we get to class?" He held out his arm to her, as chivalrous as a prince, and her lips tilted upwards in a charming smiling, as she took it.

"So, have you heard the rumors?" He made a questioning sound to indicate he was listening. "Trelawney partnered me up with that strange Pettigrew boy from Gryffindor," Lucius scoffed, "and he told me that there's supposedly some new cult that _all_ the Slytherins are supposed to be a part of." She laughed. "Like we're all in some Dark cult together." She grinned up at him, big and happy. "I mean, what would we even do in a cult?"

"Take our rightful place."

She misses a step in startled surprised, before coming to a stop. "What?"

He's not looking at her, but is instead staring over her head into the distance, eyes far away, in a different world, a different future. "We are better than the muggles."

"… What?"

Suddenly, he's focused on her, grey eyes sharp and intense, lit with a fanatical gleam. "They are nothing, Evangeline, don't you see that? And we hide from them like they are more powerful than us, like they are better than us. We should rule this world."

"And them?"

"We're _better_ than them, Evangeline. Why bother denying it?"

"I – it's just safer to stay apart, Lucius, can't you see that?" She tries to make him understand. "They're greedy and simple and… numerous. They would try to find a way to take advantage of magic. Kill our creatures, our way of life."

"Only if we let them."

She doesn't want to ask her next question, wants to step away, but forced herself to stay and ask. "And how do you propose we stop them?"

He's looking down the arch of his regal nose at her, poised and arrogant, every inch a pureblood sure of his power. "Anyway we wish." It is very clear what he means. It will be force, it will be death, it will be a dictatorship based on torture and Unforgivable Curses and absolutely no mercy.

"Lucius…" She's staring at him in dawning horror, at this boy that she's known since she was eleven, that she's shared classes and summers and dorms with. At this beautiful boy who was her first boyfriend, her first kiss, her first everything. She was from a good pureblood family, not well-known, not wealthy, but old. She had imagined their life together past school, marriage, children. But this man… she didn't know him. She didn't know the crazy gleam in his eye, didn't know the haughty tilt of chin, and the fierce grip he had on her arm that was possessive and dominant. "Lucius… you're scaring me…"

He smirked down at her. "Don't worry, little bird." His pet name for her didn't sound endearing. "There will be no need to be frightened when the Dark Lord takes – "

"The _who_?" She wrenches her arm free of his and takes a shaking step backwards.

He straightens his shoulders. "The Dark Lord. He will lead the wizarding world to its rightful place and we, his Death Eaters, his right hands, will lead the new world with him."

"His Death Eaters?" He pulls back his sleeve and shows her his arm, where a vibrant new mark is visible, still fresh and glossy: a serpent coiling out of the mouth of a screaming skull. Her fingers are trembling as she reaches out to brush her fingertips gently across it, to know that it is real. "Lucius… _what have you done?_" She feels her world shattering apart around her.

"What needs to be done."

She doesn't want this. Doesn't want there to be a war, a coup. She's heard the stories, read the books, about Grindelwald, about his fervor and zeal and insanity. She doesn't want to live in a world that is crumbling, that is unstable and unknown and falling apart and different. She just wants this, what she (what _they_) have had up until now. She doesn't want death and destruction and chaos and bloodshed. She doesn't want curses and dark marks and cults. She takes another step backwards, shaking her head. "Lucius…"

He's watching her back way with the intensity of a hawk. "Join us."

"Lucius… I can't…" She didn't want this…

"Change the world order with us." She's still backing away, closer to the castle, to what she knows. "I will not beg you, or ask you again, Evangeline." Is this it then? An ultimatum? Lucius and his zealots and his Dark Lord… or nothing?

Her eyes snag on the mark on his arm. It seems to be pulsing, the skull looking into her soul, pulling her closer to the darkness. She wrenches her eyes away. "_No…_" It's a breath, a whisper. "No." Stronger, this time, confident. "_No._" She turns and heads towards Hogwarts, head held high, even as her hands tremble, even as her heart breaks.

Walking through those doors feels like finality, feels like the end. She knows it is the last time she will ever see him as Lucius Malfoy – a boy she loves, a man she had imaged her life with.

From now on, he is only a Death Eater.


End file.
